South Korea's antitrust regulator has admitted for the first time that it is looking into whether Google has violated the country's anticompetition laws.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) disclosed the investigation in a brief statement. It did not say what the probe was about nor any potential antitrust violations. The KFTC apparently raided Google's Seoul headquarters in July.

The antitrust body's statement came after a local media report said the KFTC had decided to clear Google of anticompetition charges involving the pre-loading of the company's apps on smartphones running on the Android operating system. So it probably wants to make it clear that no thumbs have been raised for the search engine yet.

While it wasn't clear whether the probe would lead to any formal charges, the investigation is another regulatory headache for Google. The firm was fined $6.8 million in Russia on Thursday and faces multiple European Union antitrust charges.

The KFTC has investigated Google before. In 2013, the regulator cleared Google of wrongdoing following a probe into whether the company hurt competition by forcing smartphone makers using Android to pre-load its search engine on the handsets.

Samsung is spending millions of dollars pushing its upcoming Galaxy Note 7 tablet in the USA and thinks that hiring Austrian film star Christopher Waltz to mock how busy citizens already are will help persuade Americans to favour a Korean product over Apple offerings.

According to Android Headlines, Waltz, who starred in Django Unchained and Spectre, has made a series of adverts to promote the Korean products for the Galaxy Note 7, described as a phablet by the wire.

In an advert, Waltz mocks Americans for constantly working working working and being busy busy busy.

The specs for the tablet seem to be pretty interesting as the thing only weighs 169 grammes, has a 5.7 inch screen and comes with four gigabytes of RAM and a pretty respectable 64 gigabytes of storage.

Apple, according to insiders close to the Cupertino firm, is seriously rattled by the depradations on its market from the South Korean outsider.

And, if previous reports on Fudzilla are to be believed, Apple has very little up its sleeves to fight against the foreign contenders for its American throne.

The tablet will make its appearance on the 19th of August but no prices are yet available although it’s believed Samsung will really go for the jugular in an increasingly competitive market.

South Korean has found that a low-risk computer "worm" had been removed from devices connected to some nuclear plant control systems.

An investigation found no harmful virus was found in reactor controls threatened by a hacker. Apparently the reactor was getting spam from Dr Omgo from Nigeria who wanted to use its bank account to transfer a million dollars out of the country.

Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power said it would beef up cyber security by hiring more IT security experts and forming an oversight committee, as it came in for fresh criticism from lawmakers following recent hacks against its headquarters.

The nuclear operator, part of state-run utility Korea Electric Power, said earlier this month that non-critical data had been stolen from its systems, while a hacker threatened in Twitter messages to close three reactors.

Energy Minister Yoon Sang-jick told a parliamentary session that evidence of the presence and removal of a "worm" - which the ministry said was probably inadvertently introduced by workers using unauthorized USB devices - was unrelated to the recent hacking incidents.

South Korea, which relies on nuclear reactors for a third of its power and is the world's fifth-largest nuclear power user, have mounted since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and a domestic scandal in 2012 over the supply of reactor parts with fake security certificates.

A single group of hackers have been targeting servers in South Korea for nearly four years, according to McAfee. The group spied on the South Korea military and provide one possible motive for ongoing attacks on South Korea that date to 2009.

McAfee, said they were carried out by a hackers group known as the New Romanic Cyber Army Team. Clearly anything with a name so 1980s is probably based in a place which is so backward that it still thinks shoulder pads for women are a pretty innovative idea. Seoul has blamed North Korea for some of the cyber attacks although Pyongyang denies responsibility and says it too has been a victim.

McAfee released a 29-page technical paper that analyzed the code of the software used by those hackers. It said the hacking gang infected PCs with sophisticated software that automatically sought out documents of interest by scanning computers for military keywords in English and Korean. Once the software identified documents of interest, it encrypted those files then delivered them to the hackers' servers, McAfee said.

The word Troy frequently appeared in the code of the malicious software. The New Romanic Cyber Army Team makes frequent use of Roman and classical terms.

Samsung is seeking a complete ban on the sales of the upcoming Apple iPhone 5 in South Korea, in apparent retaliation Job's Mob's patent trolling in Europe, the US and Australia. After the launch of the iPhone 5, Samsung plans to take Apple to court here for its violation of Samsung’s wireless technology-related patents, Samsung said.

It will be impossible for Apple to contest the patent and remain connected to a mobile phone base station. Normally such patents are licenced, but Samsung has had a gutsful of Apple not playing fair in its patent trollage so the idea is to give it a taste of its own medicine. By refusing to licence the technology, Samsung is forcing Apple to accept a ban in a growing market.

So far, Samsung has not been entering into a dogfight with Apple. However, it appears that Jobs' Mob might have crossed a line with some of its legal antics in Europe. That effectively locked the Galaxy Tab out of Germany.

There is also an element of cutting its own nose off to spite its face. The iPhone has shedloads of Samsung technology under the bonnet. The iPhone 5 will have Samsung’s NAND flash memories and application processors.

More than 27,000 South Koreans have signed up for a class-action lawsuit against Apple accusing the company of privacy violations regarding location data stored on the owners' iPhones. The $26 million suit was officially filed in Changwon District Court yesterday.

According to Associated Press, each person wants Jobs' Mob to write a cheque for $932 in damages. Kim Hyeong-seok, one of their attorneys, said that the suit targets Apple and its South Korean unit to "protect privacy" rights. The claim is that the location-tracking feature on the iPhone inflicted emotional distress on the device owners who are already under enough stress, having been identified by their mates as being dumb enough to own one of the shiny toys.

Apple denied tracking iPhone users, claiming the data collected in the unencrypted file was merely information on cell tower and Wi-Fi network locations. Later it admitted that there was a software glitch which prompted iPhones to send anonymous location data to Apple servers from devices whose location services were disabled.

Chinese computer hackers hacked South Korean military files on a planned spy plane purchase from the United States. Shin Hak-Yong, an opposition Democratic Party lawmaker and a member of parliament's defence committee has revealed that the hackers accessed information in defence ministry computers on the plan to buy unmanned Global Hawk aircraft.

Speaking to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper Hak-Yong said the the government has not raised the issue with China yet and is still debating how to handle it. Seoul wrote a $40.4 million cheque for the spy plane following the North's alleged attack on a South Korean warship that left 46 sailors dead in March 2010.

China is a bit spooked by the spyplane, which is also likely to be flogged to Japan. It fears the neighbouring nations could keep watch over its territory.

Boffins in South Korea have come up with a networking router which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second.

According to Technology Review the technique, developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology uses cheap commodity chips, such as those made by Intel and Nvidia, in high-performance routers, in place of custom-made hardware.

Software developed by the researchers could also serve as a testbed for novel networking protocols that might eventually replace the ancient ones currently in play. The current system means that commercial software routers from companies such as Vyatta can typically only attain transfer data at speeds of up to three gigabytes per second which makes the router a bit of a bottleneck.

Sue Moon, leader of the lab in which the research was conducted and her students Sangjin Han and Keon Jang developed software called PacketShader which they wanted to get a PC router to 10 gigabytes per second. Once they worked out the principle they were able to push it to 40.

PacketShader uses a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) to help process packets of data sent across a network.